There are people who are coming to see this production because they were at the first one, and it changed their lives. The Connection opened on the Lower East Side in 1959. There was a lot of experimental theater happening at the time (along with dance, literature, and graphic arts): Environmental Theater, Jerzy Grotowski, Antonin Artaud, The Performance Garage, The Wooster Group. People were taking theater and tossing it up against the fourth wall of convention to watch it shatter. The Living Theatre with Julian Beck and Judith Malina was part of that movement. Since Beck’s death Malina carries on.
The Connection must have set a few heads spinning. Its improvisational style, still in evidence, combined with its subject matter - heroin addicts waiting for the man with the plan to show up - with the added ingredient of jazz, in the form of Jackie McClean and company, were about as far away from uptown as you could get. Seeing this production, it is easy to imagine what it must have been like when the East Side was gritty and people still smoked in theaters. Nine years later Hair was born - a direct descendant.
This production of The Connection tries, but it does not rise to the occasion. It feels stalled in the past, with actors in the present unable to crowbar it free. The depiction of the junkies is wildly uneven. They go from crystal-clear to maniacal at the drop of a hat. There is no building tension as the time for the drug delivery gets nearer. When it does happen, the characters again fluctuate in their portrayal of their submission to their vice. In addition there is “interference” from the “producer and playwright” who try to explain their hopes and/or disappointments to us in a sort of jumbled delivery that serves to distract us even more.
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